Book of Acts
God is up to something in our world. God is still at work. The resurrection of Jesus is a new beginning – for us and for the whole world. As Christians – people who are called to follow Jesus – we are invited to find our place in the story of love that God is writing in our world, to take part in God’s work of love. God is making all things new, bringing healing and peace and hope – and God invites us to join Jesus in that work.
On Sunday we kicked off a new sermon series that we are calling “Church on the Move: Turning the World Upside Down.” During this series, we will be reading the book of Acts and exploring the story of the earliest church – those Christians who gathered together in the days, months, and years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is a story about people whose whole world upside down – who saw that Jesus, though he had died, was somehow raised from the dead, was somehow still alive and at work. And then, having seen their whole world be changed, they responded to God’s amazing love by risking everything to share that love with others.
In the book of Acts, the church continues the story of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as Jesus had fed the hungry and healed the sick and welcomed the outcast and crossed boundaries for the sake of love, the early church did those things too. The early church shared the story of what God had done in Jesus Christ – and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, they also continued that story, as God kept showing up and working for good.
We are hoping that studying the book of Acts will be an opportunity for all of us to learn from the early church – to get excited about finding our own place in the story of love that God is still writing in the world. God is still working for good, transforming lives, and welcoming all people at the table of Jesus. We hope that taking a look at the early church and seeing how passionate they were about joining in God’s work might encourage us to join God’s work today with that same kind of passion.
As part of this series, we are encouraging everyone at the church to read the book of Acts along with us over the next several weeks. We’ve got a reading plan that we have shared online and via some bookmarks (which you can put in your Bible to help you remember what you’ve read). If you haven’t started reading yet, don’t worry, you can catch up in about 15-20 minutes and then be good to go to read along with us each day! We hope that by studying the story of how God used the early church to turn the world upside down, we might discover how God is calling us – calling our church –also to join in God’s work of turning the world upside down in the power of Christ’s love.
I hope you’ll plan to dive into the book of Acts together with us. God is still inviting us to be a movement of love – to join in the work of Jesus in a world that desperately needs God’s grace, peace, and hope. We hope to discover, together, how God is building us into a church that is part of what God is doing – how we might reach new people, follow Jesus beyond what we might choose to do on our own, and build up communities of justice, mercy, and love.
God is still up to something. During this sermon series, we hope to pay attention to how God has been at work among the church in the past, so that we might imagine how God is and will be at work among us now and into the future.
